Alabama Prison Agency Evaluated a $15.7M Program Twice in Six Years

Alabama's Department of Examiners of Public Accounts⧉ -- the state's legislative-branch audit agency -- examined the Alabama Department of Corrections' finances for the six fiscal years from October 2018 through September 2024 and found the Department completed only two evaluations of the organizations running its Community Corrections Program⧉, a network of county diversion programs the Department itself says disbursed $15,739,400 in fiscal year 2024 alone.▸ State law requires one evaluation every year. Neither of the two the Department did complete was done on an annual basis.

Code of Alabama 1975, Section 15-18-174(7)⧉ requires ADOC to audit and annually evaluate the organizations participating in its Community Corrections Program -- the diversion system that lets counties supervise offenders outside prison in exchange for a state per-diem payment.▸ The April 24, 2026 report doesn't treat this as a new problem: it states the same lapse "was reported in prior examinations as Findings 2018-02 and 2014-03," meaning the Department's two previous financial-compliance examinations -- each covering roughly six years of its own -- flagged the identical gap. Three examination cycles running, spanning at least a decade, have found the same evaluation requirement unmet.

The Community Corrections Program is not a rounding error inside ADOC's budget -- it is a statewide operation.▸ ADOC's own FY2024 Annual Legislative Statistical Report says the Department's Community Corrections Division paid a daily per diem to county programs in 52 counties, invoicing an average of 2,765 diverted offenders every month and disbursing $15,739,400 over the year. At fiscal year end, 4,207 offenders were participating in one of the state's 38 community corrections programs, and 2,223 completed their sentence during the year -- real money moving to real programs supervising real people outside a system that otherwise held 20,369 people at year end.

The state's enacted FY2026 budget appropriates the program its own line -- $14,100,000, in the same range as the FY2024 disbursement -- inside ADOC's $826,704,722 total state General Fund appropriation, about 1.7% of the Department's full state budget.

The same examination found ADOC never filed a legally required accounting of what it spent on inmate mental-health and healthcare services.▸ The FY2024 General Fund Appropriation Act⧉ required the Department to report its fiscal year 2023 mental-health and healthcare expenditures -- "including a detailed explanation of cost increases" -- to the House Ways and Means-General Fund Committee, the Senate Finance and Taxation-General Fund Committee, and the Legislative Fiscal Officer before the 2024 Regular Session opened. It did not. And this, too, is a repeat: the audit cites the identical failure from the Department's prior examination, as Finding 2018-01. Two of the last two examination cycles have found ADOC skipping the one report specifically designed to show lawmakers why inmate healthcare costs were rising.

The fourth finding turns from reporting gaps to basic financial controls.▸ Examiners reviewed 10 correctional-facility internal audit reports⧉ covering the facilities' own bank accounts. At seven, checks, deposits, bank statements, receipts, or expenditure documentation was missing. At two, no bank reconciliation records were available for examiners to review at all. Reports also noted deposits weren't being made in a timely manner. A separate, smaller finding: the Department has been charging a bad-check fee for years without ever setting the amount through an administrative rule, meaning -- as the audit puts it -- the Department "could charge varying amounts for a bad check" depending on who's collecting it.